Resources

With more than 90,000 items, the NC Digital Collections site is a great treasure for those doing family history research in this state. Developed by the State Library of North Carolina and the State Archives of North Carolina, this repository of information is well-worth your visit. The new site design now makes it easier for you to search across all the digital collection materials, and also makes it easier to see the collection groups at-a-glance.

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Happy New Year everyone! Hope you are having success in your family history research, or at least having fun trying to shatter any brickwalls you may have.

I wanted to just take a moment to point a blog definitely worth following – This Day in North Carolina History, from the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources. I’ve been following the blog for the past year and have learned so many interesting things about the history of the state! Their entries cover events from the entire time span of the state and are just overall interesting.

You can follow in several ways:

Subscribe to the RSS feed and enjoy reading at your leisure in your favorite RSS feed reader. If you’ve not used RSS feeds, watch this 3-minute video for a quick overview.

You can sign up to get each day’s post sent directly to your email inbox. This is the option I personally use as this is one blog that I want to be sure to never miss! On the right side of the site’s page is an area for you to enter your email address.

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Back in August I shared news that NC would be contributing papers to the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America digitized newspaper portal. The final title selections have now been made and announced on the North Carolina Miscellany blog of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The full list of 21 titles is on the NC Miscellany blog post. These are going to span 1836-1922 and there are sure to be many gems among their pages. All 100,000 pages planned for this phase should be online by Summer 2014. Stay tuned for more info as they start to get digitized!

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I never ceased to be amazed and the number of resources coming online that aid us as we search for stories and information about our ancestors. Thanks to a NCGenWeb researcher, I’ve recently learned about the availability of a few resources from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and thought they would be good to highlight here.

NC Runaway Slave Advertisements, 1751-1840

This database includes all known runaway slave advertisements that appeared in NC newspapers during this time period — more than 2300 of them. There are options to browse the collection by county and by decade. You can also search the full-text of the advertisements. Each record includes the digital version of the advertisement. After completing your search you can narrow by the name of the newspaper, the slave name, and the name of the person placing the ad. From my own previous research, I’d previously located this ad for Tom Whitfield, a slave of one of my family’s slaveholders Warre Kilpatrick but it was good to see that it was included here. Maybe I’ll find more information for my own research!

Civil Rights Greensboro

Greensboro was a central location of activity during the Civil Rights Era, a history recently more thoroughly acknowledged with the opening of the International Civil Rights Center & Museum a couple of years ago. The Civil Rights Greensboro website offers a great online collection of information on the city’s civil rights history. The website offers a myriad of options for searching and browsing the digital files and each record contains a wealth of information. You will also find a timeline history and an interactive map of key event locations. I grew up in Greensboro so this database touches very close to home.

Take a look! Let us know if you find something of interest in these, or other UNCG Digital Collection resources! Many thanks to the UNCG team for their hard work.

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The NC Government & Heritage Library is conducting a crowd-sourcing pilot and could use your help. This week staff uploaded images into a Flickr set (find it here) and would like to know if you can log onto Flickr and contribute by transcribing them. At the time of this post, there were 164 documents in the set, though some have already been transcribed.

There are quite a range of documents there – family bible records, newspaper clippings, handwritten family trees, handwritten letters, church records, etc; a large variety.

letter from James Woods Babcock

Their first batch of 50 documents was transcribed in 49 days – how awesome is that? To transcribe, all you need to do is log into your Flickr account and leave your transcriptions as a comment. Won’t you contribute?

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Do you subscribe to RSS feeds? Do you have a Twitter (or follow) account? If so, then you may be particularly interested in a newly developed page here in the NCGenWeb Project — our NC Genealogy 2.0 page.

The NC Genealogy 2.0 page serves as a central location for bloggers & Twitters who share information relevant to NC Genealogy. The list includes

individual bloggers

various NC genealogy societies

several feeds NC libraries with genealogy/historical emphasis

feeds you can find from several NCGenWeb county pages.

Be sure to add these to your favorite RSS feed reader so you can easily stay current with goings on across the state.

We will continue to keep the page updates, so if you know of a feed we’ve missed, please let us know by sending email to ncgenwebproject at gmail dot com.

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This week, there are celebrations ongoing in Pitt County to celebrate the county’s 250th-year anniversary. As part of the festivities, the local paper, Greenville’s Daily Reflector, is featuring their new online collection of images from the newspaper — the Daily Reflector Image Collection.

This site is a spectacular resource for anyone with historical/ancestral roots to the county. It features more than 7,500 images from the paper’s photo negatives (of which there are more than 85,000). The Joyner Library at East Carolina University has for years now been building a strong digital library collection, but this just tops the cake in my book. You can download high-quality files of the image, share them via a variety of social websites, and add your own comments to the pictures if you know something about them. Some of the images here are also on Flickr and have received a great response there. The pictures cover events and people not only in Pitt county, but in surrounding counties as well.

To learn more about the project, see their About page, where you can view a SlideShare presentation about the project’s implementation. Kudos to the Joyner Library for another great resource!

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The Randolph County, NCGenWeb site now has an RSS feed. Rodney has been posting “What’s New” items to the site for awhile now, yet the RSS Feed will enable his site updates to be delivered directly to you.

If you’re not familiar with RSS feeds, check out his post for a nice overview of the advantages. Thanks Rodney for this enhancement to the Randolph County site.

Rodney also has a Twitter account for Randolph County. These options make it easier than ever to keep up with the latest content.